the neverending reference interview of life

Menu

#andypoll – 10/12/10

And I got a tremendous response from Twitter. I have taken screenshots of the replies with the #andypoll hashtag and made one giant image. (I don’t think I made it big enough, but as someone who doesn’t need glasses, I can still read it.)

I was going to write about what I see in this jungle of replies, but first I want to know what do YOU see in these tweets? I’ll share my thoughts tomorrow.

Leave a comment with your observations and thoughts or if there is something in particular that caught your attention.

5 thoughts on “#andypoll – 10/12/10”

I think that the tweets in the picture offer a wonderful ‘snapshot’ of the brains of librarians of all types and locations and what is pressing upon them at the moment. Some of the concerns were tangible and immediate: staff management and shortages, budget woes, and what was being offered at the library right at that moment. Others were most aloof and philosophical: how the profession treats itself and others, where the library is headed in the future, and how we get action now for those things that woe us. The remainder are specific issues that I think were mentioned because it was something that is always on that librarian’s mind.

There’s a hundred professional journal articles and probably a thousand blog posts that could originate out of that tangle of tweets. Someone could very easily mine that poll whenever they feel that they’ve run out of things to write about.

Yes, I could definitely use these tweets as future blog fodder. It was interesting to see how many librarians had similar concerns to mine. “Vanilla” collections? Check. Budget problems? Check. Public who think our jobs can be done by volunteers? Check. Actually, many of our administrators seem to be of that opinion, too … but that’s a topic for many blog posts to come.

The only caveat that I see in terms of using it as a blog subject is that tweets are very anecdotal; that is, they only represent those librarians on Twitter and do not make for a scientific sample size. However, that does not diminish their significance to me since I find Twitter to adequate in representing a healthy cross section of librarian types.